Moscow (AFP) - Imprisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny will appeal Tuesday against a nine-year prison sentence handed down in March on charges he and his opponents say are politically motivated.

The session comes at a time when the Russian authorities seek to silence the voices of the remaining opposition and with Moscow continuing its military campaign in its neighbor Ukraine, which has led to the deaths of thousands of people and the displacement of nearly ten million.

In late March, a court increased the prison sentence of a prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin to nine years, after convicting him of embezzlement and insulting the court in previous sessions.

Navalny is currently serving a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence in a prison 100 kilometers east of Moscow for violating the terms of his release in a previous fraud case dating back to 2014.

On Tuesday, he will appeal the harsher prison sentence, and will attend the session in a Moscow court via video call from his prison.

If the court upholds the decision, the 45-year-old dissident will be transferred to a prison complex subject to a stricter regime than in complexes such as the one in which he is currently being held.

The nine-year prison sentence against Navalny cancels the two-and-a-half-year sentence he is serving and replaces it, which means that Navalny will remain behind bars for another eight years.

In the latest case, investigators accuse Navalny of embezzling millions of dollars in donations to his political organizations for personal purposes.

Navalny's name has emerged as an anti-corruption blogger, and before his imprisonment, anti-government demonstrations took place across Russia.
In 2018, he campaigned to run for president but was ultimately barred from running in the race in which Putin secured a fourth term.
In his absence, his team continues to publish investigations into the fortunes of Russian elites. Millions watched these investigations on YouTube.
In August 2020, he survived poisoning with a Novichok nerve agent, which was developed in the Soviet era. Navalny holds the Kremlin responsible for that process.
He was arrested last year upon his return to the country from Germany, where he spent a period of convalescence, which sparked a storm of criticism in the West and caused the imposition of sanctions on Moscow.
In June 2021, the most prominent opposition organizations were classified as "extremist" by the judiciary, in a decision that led to their closure and the launch of judicial prosecutions against a number of their activists. Many of them are now in exile to avoid prosecution. Others have been arrested and face severe prison sentences.
Russia has recently stepped up pressure on independent media and non-governmental organizations, declaring many of them "foreign agents," while other organizations have stopped working for fear of prosecution.
In an effort to strengthen its control over publicly available information at home, the authorities have banned well-known social media platforms, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, and have initiated legal proceedings against the giant technology group Meta, which it accuses of publishing "calls to kill" Russians.